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You're reading from  Game Development with Three.js

Product typeBook
Published inOct 2013
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781782168539
Edition1st Edition
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Author (1)
Isaac Sukin
Isaac Sukin
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Isaac Sukin

Isaac Sukin has been building games since he was eight years old, when he discovered that Nerf Arena Blast came with a copy of Epic Games' Unreal Editor. At 16, he became co-leader of the Community Bonus Pack team, an international group of game developers for the Unreal Engine that won 49 awards over the next few years. He started learning to code around the same time by developing an open source Facebook-style statuses system that thousands of websites have adopted. Since then, he has been increasingly drawn to interactive JavaScript on the web. He created an open source 2D game engine in early 2012 and then dove into Three.js. As of 2013, he is a senior, studying entrepreneurship and information management at the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked for Twitter, First Round Capital, and Acquia among others, and was previously a freelance consultant and developer. He is also a founder of Dorm Room Fund, a student-run venture capital fund that invests in student-run startups. You can find him on GitHub and Twitter under the alias IceCreamYou or visit his website at www.isaacsukin.com. He has previously published short stories and poetry, but this is his first book.
Read more about Isaac Sukin

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Choosing your environment


The Google Chrome browser is usually considered to be on the leading edge of WebGL support, so many Three.js developers work mainly in either the latest stable version of Chrome or the alpha-release branch, named Canary. Chrome has a lot of other advantages too, such as advanced performance profiling, the ability to emulate touch events, and support for inspecting canvas frames. (You can access these features through the Chrome Developer Tools settings. Canvas inspection is explained well at http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/canvas/inspection/.) If you want to experiment with WebGL features that are still in development, you can enable some of them in Canary's about:flags page.

When it comes to coding, the online Three.js editor is great for testing small, isolated concepts, but it quickly gets cumbersome for more complex projects. Most programming environments have solid JavaScript support, but some are better than others.

Chrome also has a script-editing environment that works well for some people. If you open the Chrome Developer Tools (Ctrl / Cmd + Shift + I) and switch to the Sources tab, you can configure Chrome to edit files from your local filesystem. This environment includes syntax highlighting, debugging, autocompletion, source mapping for minified files, revision control that visually shows changes, and the ability to run the code instantly without reloading the page. Additionally, you can store snippets for reuse as described at https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/authoring-development-workflow#snippets.

You can see what the editor looks like in the following screenshot:

Google Chrome Developer Tools

If you prefer to work outside of the Chrome editor, it can be tedious to constantly switch windows and reload the page. There are several tools that attempt to solve this. LiveReload (http://livereload.com/) and Tin.cr (http://tin.cr/) are the best known; they are browser extensions that automatically reload the page when you save a file. You may also want to try LightTable (http://www.lighttable.com/), an experimental IDE that also autoreloads and additionally includes tools for visually manipulating your code.

If you use Sublime Text as your editor, you can install autocompletion support for Three.js commands through the package manager or from the Three.js repository itself (in /utils/editors).

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Published in: Oct 2013Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781782168539
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Author (1)

author image
Isaac Sukin

Isaac Sukin has been building games since he was eight years old, when he discovered that Nerf Arena Blast came with a copy of Epic Games' Unreal Editor. At 16, he became co-leader of the Community Bonus Pack team, an international group of game developers for the Unreal Engine that won 49 awards over the next few years. He started learning to code around the same time by developing an open source Facebook-style statuses system that thousands of websites have adopted. Since then, he has been increasingly drawn to interactive JavaScript on the web. He created an open source 2D game engine in early 2012 and then dove into Three.js. As of 2013, he is a senior, studying entrepreneurship and information management at the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked for Twitter, First Round Capital, and Acquia among others, and was previously a freelance consultant and developer. He is also a founder of Dorm Room Fund, a student-run venture capital fund that invests in student-run startups. You can find him on GitHub and Twitter under the alias IceCreamYou or visit his website at www.isaacsukin.com. He has previously published short stories and poetry, but this is his first book.
Read more about Isaac Sukin